Samain and the Choice Moon
Friday gratefuls: Cardiology. 1818 Ogden Street. Enlarged Aorta. A trip down the hill. Potluck tonight. Participating in the service. The oneg. Mindy’s chocolate treat. Leo coming on Sunday. Luke to Florida. His mom. Veronica. Rabbi Steve. Rabbi Jamie. Joan. Cooking. Classes. Reading about Jewish Identity. Preparing a session on emunah, faith, with clouds as the metaphor. The kippah. Israel. Having a new name.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Lev, the heart-mind
One brief shining: Revelation, revealing, stripping, strip clubs are religions really strip clubs for the sacred and the holy I ask this only because I wonder what neon sign synagogues and mosques and churches might put out front to advertise themselves maybe a cloud fading away, returning, or maybe a rock solid boulder with a small halo, or perhaps a great waterfall, sure you could go with the usual the cross, the crescent, the star of David, but how yesterday let’s catch up with the times, eh?
Revelation. Simple, really. Reveals. Reveals what? Ah, there’s the rub. If it reveals, and here’s a very serious question, why were these matters covered up in the first place? Occulted. Hidden. Obscured. And, if they are so powerful, so important, so necessary why go to the trouble to make them difficult to locate or understand? I mean, come on.
Take Mohammed, his name be blessed, in the cave. God downloaded the Quran from the cloud through him. Holy Dropbox! Or, Moses authoring the Torah. Or, the moving finger guiding Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Not to mention all of us who subsequently made a living helping people understand all this revelation. All the ink spilled since on the meaning of jihad, salvation, Abraham. Not to mention too, all the blood spilled. Institutions, buildings, gathered wealth and power. Moving far away, as Emile Durkheim predicted, from the charisma, tending toward the bureaucratic.
Was this the point of all those who wrote and who later claimed or had claimed for them, divine inspiration? Doubt it. But we are human, all too human, bound to want to hoard wisdom, fence off knowledge, keep others a safe distance from our stash.
So revelation has this unintended consequence of creating religions, never the point. But if not what was the point and why did the revelations stop coming? Did the God referred to in these Abrahamic religions stop talking? Did the still small voice become so still and small as to be inaudible?
Real talk. We’ve blocked our ears. Shut our eyes. Swathed our hands. Stopped up our nose. Closed our mouth. Revelation never stopped. How could it? The sacred reality of our daily life screams to be heard. To be seen. To be felt. Smelled, tasted. Taken into our bodies, realized too, from our inner world, the still small voice of the sacred? No. It shouts to you from your inner cathedral (Ira Progoff). You are made in the image of Mother Earth! You are part of this vast throbbing, buzzing universe perhaps its consciousness, its opportunity to perceive itself and you spend your time worried? No. It has all been provided for you. Just look around. And you’ll know.